Liverpool had its Fab Four, but now Jaipur in India has its own Fab Five — writers Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil, Ruchir Joshi and Anand.

When the Rajasthan police apparently concocted a fictitious assassination plot leading Salman Rushdie to stay away from the Jaipur Literature Festival, the mood in Jaipur was glum. Everyone took the plot to be real, until The Hindu reported the convoluted manipulation by the police.

Many in India wanted to hear Rushdie, who avoided India during the fatwa years and has been able to make only a few visits since 2000. Festival goers were hoping to hear him speak about the filming of Midnight’s Children and his forthcoming memoir. But protests from Muslim groups and the plausible threat made him change his mind.

Which is where the Fab Four came in. On Friday, Poughkeepsie, NY-based Kumar, who teaches at Vassar and who has irritated Hindu nationalists in the past with his magnificent, in-your-face memoir, Husband of a Fanatic started reading passages from The Satanic Verses. Hari Kunzru, a British-Indian novelist based in New York  also took a stand at the same panel discussion. Both novelists stopped reading after the alarmed festival organisers pleaded with them.

Kunzru, a former English PEN vice-president, takes freedom of expression seriously. When the European Writers’ Parliament met in Istanbul and Turkish authors protested against the presence of VS Naipaul, forcing Naipaul to cancel his appearance, Kunzru spoke out. Reading from Rushdie’s controversial novel was no different.

The mood in Jaipur had changed. By  Friday afternoon, unexpectedly, the poet and novelist Jeet Thayil picked another passage from The Satanic Verses, and read aloud. Finally, Ruchir Joshi, film-maker and novelist, whose magical The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is an uproarious account of a futuristic India, read from The Satanic Verses. Tensions rose.

Soon thereafter, the police arrived, making inquiries about illegal conduct at the festival. Importing The Satanic Verses into India is prohibited but the law is unclear if possessing the novel is a crime, or reading aloud an extract from it is a crime. A lawyer or the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, the only local civil society group to support Rushdie last week, said that as the four authors read extracts from downloads, and not a book, it may not be a crime. Shashi Tharoor, novelist, diplomat, and parliamentarian pointed out he has routinely quoted and cited from The Satanic Verses and never been troubled.

In any case, the police should not throw around terms terms such as “guilt” and “crime”, as they have been doing, when they haven’t filed charges, nor proved their case before a judge.

The government could claim that by reading from the novel the authors incited the public. But incited to do what? Demand overturning the ban, nothing more. In fact, eyewitnesses say that the four authors were listened to in respectful silence, and warmly applauded. In any case, if the government wishes to proceed against the authors and is really mean-spirited, it could do so under S. 295A which gives the state the power to use criminal law against individuals who may have intended to cause trouble. But was there criminal intent, or mens rea? Sure, this is defiance, and it challenges a governmental act but it is Gandhian in its peaceful nature.

Police are seeking recordings of the reading, which, at the time of writing, the festival organisers are refusing to hand over. It is clear that the Rajasthan Police’s actions are meant to intimidate the authors and their supporters.

The role of the festival organisers — while their position is delicate — also requires scrutiny. If an author read from Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, or Liu Xiaobo’s poems, or displayed Ai Wei Wei’s art at a public event in China, one would expect that the police would swoop down, and the organisers would very likely be forced to hand over the author to the Chinese security.

But this is India; a nation that holds elections, calls itself a democracy, and has a constitution that offers some protection for free speech. The actions of the Indian government in recent days, the intimidation of the five writers and its pusillanimity over Rushdie’s visit fall considerably short of India’s aspirations and claims.

While the organisers haven’t yet handed over the tapes, they told the authors to leave Jaipur immediately, lest they be arrested. It is not known if they offered them any protection. Worse, a lawyerly statement was issued, which in effect blamed the authors for “disturbing the peace”, because they acted outside the confines of the law. The organisers dissociated themselves from the action — which they can make a case for,  but did not uphold the four’s right to speak freely, which is harder to justify. They should have said that even though they disagreed with the action, they’d defend the principle of free speech. But India isn’t there yet, it seems.

Future participants, apparently, will have to conform to rules not yet defined, so that they act within the confines of the law. Such rules defeat the rationale of a festival of literature, where ideas are expressed to be argued over and debated; such rules restrict fundamental freedoms.

On Sunday, the writer Anand —who publishes dalit literature under the imprint Navayana — joined the protests, reading an eloquent passage from The Satanic Verses, which underscores the spirit of the protests:

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive: or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits: but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

On Monday, leading Indian writers began to circulate a petition to the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, calling for the ban on The Satanic Verses to be lifted. The battle to undo the damage of the past quarter century has begun.

There are no ifs and buts. As Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses:

A Poets work (is) to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

It is time for India to wake up.

Sign the petition for the ban on The Satanic Verses to be lifted

Salil Tripathi is a journalist and author and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee

The post Writers take a stand against Rushdie ban appeared first on Index on Censorship.

I’ve been imagining other parliaments, parallel to this one — parliaments of doctors firemen and painters – dedicated to discussing the European problems proper to their professions. Perhaps I’m missing the point. If such events aren’t being organised then it is because we, as writers, are expected to fulfil a function that doctors and firemen and painters cannot.

You have accepted this invitation, presumably because like me, and you have a particular sense of the role of the writer. I don’t believe the writer is merely an entertainer, though we certainly shouldn’t be above entertainment, above giving pleasure. Nor are we just journalists, recorders of the doings of the world, or apolitical bohemians, dedicated to aesthetic shock. We may be any of these things, but this is not all we are. As lovers of language, as people who are dedicated to it and who value it very highly, we are — whether we like it or not — always already engaged in the political struggles of our day, many of which take place on the terrain of language — its use to produce social and national identity, its use to frame laws and norms, its use to define what it means to be a human, to lead a good or just or valuable life.

There’s a saying that culture is something that is done to us, but art is something we do to culture. We’re here in the 2010 City of Culture – an accolade it seems slightly superfluous to bestow on Istanbul, which is so visibly the product of millennia of European civilization. But we should be here to do something to culture, to set some terms for the future. There are many things we could spend the next few days discussing but I’d like to propose three areas where I think we can do useful work.

The first is in what I would call the space of literature:

New technologies of communication and distribution of information have already changed the space in which we, as writers, live and work. The transnational networks are now the place in which we make our writing, where we research, where our work is archived and where we reach our readers. They are not, it goes without saying, a natural space, but one whose protocols and conventions are set – by engineers, by administrators, and by the companies who own the infrastructure and make the equipment we use to access it. It’s already the case that without access to the internet, people are denied participation in much of world culture. I think the production of this new space is too important to be left to engineers, administrators and corporate executives. We, as writers ought to help set the terms. Of those three groups, our natural allies are the engineers. We should be talking to them. What kind of information space do we, as writers, want to occupy? Where do we want to live and work? What values should be embedded in that space, what protections, what sanctions?

Issues such as net neutrality (the equality of all information traffic), censorship, data collection, personal privacy, and the lack of a persistent archive are of great importance to us. But there are two major tendencies emerging, both of which are having a profound impact.

The first is the emergence of open and collaborative ways of producing and sharing information. The highest profile example of this is Wikipedia. We should support an ethic of openness. However, in this world of sharing and infinite reproducibility, the value of our labor is being driven down. People want us to work for free. How are we to live, as writers? Should we even expect to live from writing?

The second is the privatisation of public space. We live in a period of enclosures unparalleled since the sixteenth century. All around, resources are being privatised, and cultural resources are chief among them. We communicate using private services which own the content we create. Send a message on a social network like Facebook, post a picture or write a text and you do not own your words. You are adding value to the company, and you have little control over how your data is used. This is just the tip of the iceberg. When social and cultural life takes place on privately-owned networks, the values of the owners inevitably dominate. At the moment the internet is held open for us by international protocols and conventions. We need to recognise, as writers, how important they are, and to participate in their maintenance and formulation. It is my hope that this meeting recognises the importance of information as a commons, a good that should be freely accessible and shared by all, while also recognising that the production of information is labour, and has value.

The second area of concern is the so-called war on terror, a phrase which has, of late, been retired by those who originated it, now it has come to indicate something quixotic and sinister, instead of the noble enterprise it was once claimed to be.

Nearly a decade after it was inaugurated, this is the conceptual frame under which we are forced to live and speak and write. Ordinary laws, and ordinary canons of decency and civility have been suspended. We are in a perpetual state of emergency, with no end in sight. It seems clear that this state of exception is very useful in organizing and controlling the citizenry. But what should concern us as writers is the way the war on terror has degraded language. It is not only the brutal neologisms, the jargon and the corrosive euphemisms which have become part of our linguistic currency – extraordinary rendition, harsh interrogation techniques, enemy combatant — a list of words whose intention is to deceive – to which one might also usefully add words like “martyr” and “crusader”, for the deception is not merely one-sided.

Above all the degradation is a degradation of our thought by crude oppositions, talk of a “clash of civilisations”, or any number of other binary formulations which serve to harden the lines between ordinary people who have no stake in this so-called global war. The cynics on both sides who are manipulating this situation accuse anyone who questions the absoluteness of their oppositions of a kind of moral relativism. In fact, just the opposite is true. As writers, as lovers of language, we should work to preserve the truth of our words, to call things like torture by their proper names, or if those names are worn out to find new ones. We should cherish debate, and use the full power of language to overcome crude binarisms.

The third area of concern for us as writers is the use of language to produce identity. In the European context this is particularly crucial, as the economic crisis is immiserating large numbers of people, who are — as always in European history — turning towards xenophobia and atavistic nationalism in the hope of identifying an enemy more tangible than global capital.

It seems to me that multiculturalism, once a useful and progressive kind of politics, is no longer functioning as well as it did. The limits of identity politics are becoming clear. Instead of a playful, creative blending of the best of host and migrant cultures, the terms of multiculturalism are increasingly used by cultural conservatives of all stripes to police cultural boundaries. A liberal politics of absolute inclusivity, while presenting itself as pragmatic, has the disadvantage of obscuring genuine differences and antagonisms. Identity politics, which privileges categories like race and religion, is wilfully silent about class. Culture is, self-evidently, at the heart of this, and so we as writers have a central role to play. It sickens me to watch European bigots puffing up their chests about the values of the Enlightenment, as a badge of their superiority against poor and marginalised immigrant populations. Again, I say that opposition to this Enlightenment fundamentalism, isn’t moral relativism, but an ethical imperative. At this point, respecting difference is important, but so is asserting our common life across borders of race, class and religion. The fake pageantry of respect is no substitute for a genuine internationalism.

There are many weapons in the culture war, but chief among the techniques of policing thought and writing is that of offence. We are familiar with the use of the notion of offense by religious and ethnic minorities to gain identity-political purchase — from the Rushdie fatwa to the Mohammed cartoons, the martialling of sentiments of shame and abused honour have generated a lot of heat and not much light.

I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture. In saying this, I’m aware that this is a prime example of a concept which has been degraded by the war on terror — that many European Muslims misidentify it as a tool of Anglo-Saxon interests, a license to insult them, rather than the sole guarantee of their right to be heard.

It is in this context that we must deal with the absence of VS Naipaul from this meeting, which I find regrettable. I feel we would be stronger and more credible if we were to deal wih divergent views within this meeting rather than a priori excluding someone because of fear that offence might be given.

Our kind Turkish hosts have invited us here, as an international group, to air our views, and so it is my belief that we must not shy away from recognising the situation here, where we are speaking. I know by doing so, as a guest, I risk giving offence, but it would be absurd to assert freedom of speech in the abstract without exercising it in concrete terms. I want to name two writers who are not present, the nobel-prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and the editor Hrant Dink.

Both these writers, and many others, had cases brought against them under article 301 of the Turkish penal code which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity or Turkish government institutions. In its initial formulation, when it was promulgated in 2005, it was a crime to insult “Turkishness”. Pamuk faced trial for giving the following statement to a Swiss magazine “30,000 Kurds have been killed here and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares mention that. So I do.”

Dink, one of Turkey’s most prominent Armenian voices was convicted under article 301 and then murdered by a young nationalist, who was subsequently photographed in a police station, surrounded by smiling officers, against the backdrop of the national flag.

There are many other examples in Turkey of the weapons of offence and insult being used to silence dissent. Turkey is obviously not alone in this, but since we are here, it is important that we acknowledge it. I believe that one of the most tangible and immediate results of this meeting would be to call for the repeal of section 301 and a declaration that no European writer should have to operate under the threat of similar laws.

I offer these remarks as a way of opening discussion. I look forward to debating all these issues with you over the next few days.

Hari Kunzru is the author of three novels, as well as journalism and other writing. He is Deputy President of English PEN
www.harikunzru.com

The post ‘Without free speech writers can have very little impact on culture’ appeared first on Index on Censorship.